Salesforce unveils agentic Marketing Cloud Next

Salesforce today introduced Marketing Cloud Next, a significant update to its marketing platform that embeds autonomous AI agents across the entire customer funnel. The company says the product represents a shift from traditional campaign-based marketing to its much-touted “agentic marketing,” where AI agents act independently to execute campaigns, personalize customer interactions and optimize performance.

Built on the Salesforce platform, Marketing Cloud Next uses Agentforce to automate campaign creation, customer engagement, lead qualification and media optimization. Unlike systems that layer AI on top of existing tools, Marketing Cloud Next is designed for autonomous operation.

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According to Salesforce, these AI agents can interpret business goals and carry out tasks across marketing, sales, service and commerce functions. For example, marketers can input a goal — such as raising awareness of a new product among top customers — and the AI will build and launch the campaign, manage customer journeys and personalize outreach across channels like email, SMS and web.

“With Marketing Cloud Next, we’re giving marketers more than AI-powered features — we’re delivering a complete agentic marketing solution,” Steve Hammond, Salesforce’s EVP and GM of Marketing Cloud, said in a statement. “Agentforce transforms how work gets done, but it doesn’t replace marketers. It offloads repetitive tasks so they can focus on strategy and creativity.”

Features

• Campaign creation: Marketing Cloud Next can create entire campaigns within hours, including briefs, audience segmentation, messaging and journey setup. Marketers can personalize campaigns using unstructured data from sources like Google Drive, SharePoint, Zendesk and internal documents.
• Engagement: The platform replaces “do-not-reply” messages with two-way communications. It can handle replies, personalize messages based on real-time behavior, and escalate conversations to human agents when needed. It also assembles personalized web experiences dynamically.
• Lead management: The AI agents qualify leads, communicate with prospects via email and web chat, and schedule meetings. Guardrails and human oversight checkpoints maintain brand consistency.
• Performance optimization: Agents monitor ad performance, pause underperforming content, and suggest targeting changes based on business goals. Segment Intelligence identifies high-performing audience groups to improve campaign ROI.

Availability

Marketing Cloud Next and its Agentforce features are generally available starting today. Additional features will be released later this year:

• Now available: Agentforce Campaign Creation, Personalization Decisioning, Lead Management, SDR Agent, Paid Media Optimization, Segment Intelligence.
• Coming in 2025: Marketing Cloud+ SKUs (July), Agentforce Web Curation (October), Expanded LinkedIn collaboration (November).

Salesforce said existing Marketing Cloud customers can access new capabilities through the updated Marketing Cloud+ licensing.